COMPARISON OF ROAD TRAFFIC ACCIDENT PREDICTION MODELS FOR TWO-LANE HIGHWAY INTEGRATING TRAFFIC AND PAVEMENT CONDITION PARAMETERS

In Nigeria, literature on the integration of traffic of pavement condition and traffic characteristics in predicting road traffic accident frequency on 2-lane highways are scanty, hence this article to fill the gap. A comparison of road traffic accident frequency prediction models on IIesha-Akure-Owo road based on the data observed between 2012 and 2014 is presented. Negative Binomial (NB), Ordered Logistic (OL) and Zero Inflated Negative Binomial (ZINB) models were used to model the frequency of road traffic accident occurrence using road traffic accident data from the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) and pavement conditions parameters from pavement evaluation unit of the Federal Ministry of Works, Kaduna. The explanatory variables were: annual average daily traffic (aadt), shoulder factor (sf), rut depth (rd), pavement condition index (pci), and international roughness index (iri). The explanatory variables that were statistically significant for the three models are aadt, sf and iri with the estimated coefficients having the expected signs. The number of road traffic accident on the road increases with the traffic volume and the international roughness index while it decreases with shoulder factor. The systematic variation explained by the models amounts to 87.7, 78.1 and 74.4% for NB, ZINB and OL respectively. The research findings suggest the accident prediction models that should be integrated into pavement rehabilitation.   Keywords: